Encyclopædia Britannica Australia -

Encyclopedias since 1768

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Ebola ... Eckermann, Johann Peter

Ebola: virus of the family Filoviridae that is responsible for a severe and often fatal viral hemorrhagic fever; outbreaks in primates such as gorillas and chimpanzees as well as humans have been recorded. The disease is characterized by extreme fever, rash, ...
Eboli: town, Salerno provincia, Campania regione, southern Italy, east of the city of Salerno. The higher and older section of the town dominates the Sele Plain. Historical monuments include a castle of the Colonna family and the small Romanesque-style Basilica of ...
Ebolowa: town, southwestern Cameroon. It lies 70 miles (112 km) south-southwest of Yaounde, at the intersection of roads to Kribi (west), Yaounde (northeast), and Gabon (south). It is a centre of the cocoa trade, and an agricultural school operates experimental plantations ...
Ebonics: dialect of American English spoken by a large proportion of African Americans. Many scholars hold that Ebonics, like several English creoles, developed from contacts between nonstandard varieties of colonial English and African languages. Its exact origins continue to be debated, ...
Ebony: monthly magazine geared to a middle-class African American readership. It was the first black-oriented magazine in the United States to attain national circulation.
ebony: wood of several species of trees of the genus Diospyros (family Ebenaceae), widely distributed in the tropics. The best is very heavy, almost black, and derived from heartwood only. Because of its colour, durability, hardness, and ability to take a ...
Eboue, Felix: black colonial administrator who reached the highest level of the French colonial administrative system and played a crucial role in the adherence of French Equatorial Africa to Charles de Gaulle's Free France in 1940.
Ebro River: river, the longest in Spain. The Ebro rises in springs at Fontibre near Reinosa in the Cantabrian Mountains, in Cantabria provincia of northern Spain. It flows for 565 miles (910 km) in a southeasterly course to its delta on the ...
Ebroin: mayor of the palace in the Frankish kingdom of Neustria for some 20-odd years, from 656.
ebullism: formation of bubbles in the bodily fluids because of an extreme reduction in the surrounding pressure. Aircraft pilots are susceptible to ebullism when they venture into the upper atmosphere; the higher the pilot goes, the lower the surrounding pressure becomes.
Eburon glacial stage: division of Pleistocene time in northern Europe (the Pleistocene epoch began about 1,600,000 years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago). The Eburon glacial stage preceded the Waal interglacial stage and followed the Tegelen (Tiglian) interglacial stage, which were both ...
Eca de Queiros, Jose Maria de: novelist committed to social reform who introduced naturalism and realism to Portugal. He is often considered to be the greatest Portuguese novelist and is certainly the leading 19th-century Portuguese novelist.
Ecarte: card game in the Euchre family, usually played for a stake with nonplayers making side bets. The game was highly popular in France and England in the 19th century but thereafter declined.
Ecbatana: ancient city on the site of which stands the modern city of Hamadan (q.v.), Iran. Ecbatana was the capital of Media and was subsequently the summer residence of the Achaemenian kings and one of the residences of the Parthian kings. ...
Eccard, Johannes: German composer known for his setting of the year's cycle of Lutheran chorales.
Ecce Homo: (Latin: "Behold the Man"), theme prevalent in western Christian art of the 15th to 17th century, so called after the words of Pontius Pilate to the Jews who demanded the crucifixion of Jesus (John 19:5). Paintings on this theme generally ...
eccentric-and-rod mechanism: arrangement of mechanical parts used to obtain a reciprocating straight-line motion from a rotating shaft; it serves the same purpose as a slider-crank mechanism and is particularly useful when the required stroke of the reciprocating motion is small in comparison ...
Eccles, Sir John Carew: Australian research physiologist who received (with Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley) the 1963 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the chemical means by which impulses are communicated or repressed by nerve cells (neurons).
Eccles, William Henry: British physicist who pioneered in the development of radio communication.
Ecclesia: ("gathering of those summoned"), in ancient Greece, assembly of citizens in a city-state. Its roots lay in the Homeric agora, the meeting of the people. The Athenian Ecclesia, for which exists the most detailed record, was already functioning in Draco's ...
Ecclesiastes: (Preacher), an Old Testament book of wisdom literature that belongs to the third section of the biblical canon, known as the Ketuvim (Writings). In the Hebrew Bible, Ecclesiastes stands between the Song of Solomon and Lamentations and with them belongs ...
ecclesiastical court: tribunal set up by religious authorities to deal with disputes among clerics or with spiritual matters involving either clerics or laymen. Although such courts are found today among the Jews (see bet din) and among the Muslims (Shari'ah) as well ...
ecclesiastical heraldry: the conventions affecting the use of the arms associated with the church's administrative and collegiate bodies and the portrayal of the arms of clerics. Abbeys, priories, and dioceses have their own arms, and high ecclesiastics have always impaled these with ...
Ecclesiasticus: deuterocanonical biblical work (accepted in the Roman Catholic canon but noncanonical for Jews and Protestants), an outstanding example of the wisdom genre of religious literature that was popular in the early Hellenistic period of Judaism (3rd century BC to 3rd ...
ecclesiolae in ecclesia: (Latin: "little churches within the church"), the revival in 1727 of the Hussite Unitas Fratrum, or Unity of Brethren, within the framework of the established Lutheran church of Saxony.
eccyclema: in classical Greek theatre, stage mechanism consisting of a low platform that rolled on wheels or revolved on an axis and could be pushed onstage to reveal an interior or some offstage scene such as a tableau. It was introduced ...
Ecevit, Bulent: Turkish poet, journalist, and politician, who served as prime minister of Turkey in 1974, 1977, 1978-79, and 1999-2002.
Ecgfrith: also spelled Egfrith Anglo-Saxon king of the Northumbrians from 670 who ultimately lost his wars against the Mercians on the south and the Picts on the north.
Echegaray y Eizaguirre, Jose: mathematician, statesman, and the leading Spanish dramatist of the last quarter of the 19th century. Along with the Provencal poet Frederic Mistral, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1904.
Echeveria: genus of about 100 species of succulent plants, in the stonecrop family (Crassulaceae), native from Texas to Argentina. Many are popularly called hen-and-chickens because of the way new plantlets, or offsets, develop in a cluster around the parent plant. The ...
Echeverria Alvarez, Luis: president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976.
Echeverria, Esteban: poet, fiction writer, cultural promoter, and political activist who played a significant role in the development of Argentine literature, not only through his own writings but also through his sponsoring efforts. He is one of the most important Romantic authors ...
Echidna: (Greek: "Snake"), monster of Greek mythology, half-woman, half-serpent. Her parents were either the sea deities Phorcys and Ceto or Chrysaor, the monstrous son of Medusa, and Callirrhoe, the daughter of Oceanus. Among Echidna's progeny, by the 100-headed Typhon, were Ladon ...
echidna: any of three species of peculiar egg-laying mammals from Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea that eat and breathe through a bald, tubular beak protruding from a dome-shaped body covered in spines. Echidnas have beady eyes and mere slits for ears, ...
echinococcosis: formation of cysts, or hydatids, at the site of infestation by the larval form of Echinococcus granulosus, a tapeworm common in sheep, cattle, camels, dogs, and many other mammals. The disease can develop in humans upon ingestion of the eggs, ...
echinoderm: any of a variety of invertebrate marine animals belonging to the phylum Echinodermata, characterized by a hard, spiny covering or skin. Beginning with the Lower Cambrian Period almost 570,000,000 years ago, echinoderms have a rich fossil history and are well ...
Echinosphaerites: genus of cystoids, an extinct group related to the sea lily and starfish, found as fossils in Ordovician marine rocks (between 505 and 438 million years old). It is a useful guide, or index, fossil for Ordovician rocks and time. ...
Echo: either of two experimental communications satellites launched into orbit around the Earth by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the 1960s. Consisting of aluminum-coated Mylar balloons that were inflated after launching, the Echo satellites were passive instruments-i.e., they ...
Echo: in Greek mythology, a mountain nymph, or oread. Ovid's Metamorphoses relates that Echo offended the goddess Hera by keeping her in conversation, thus preventing her from spying on one of Zeus' amours. To punish Echo, Hera deprived her of speech, ...
echo verse: a type of verse in which repetition of the end of a line or stanza imitates an echo. The repetition usually constitutes the entire following line and changes the meaning of the part being repeated. This device was popular in ...
echocardiography: diagnostic technique that uses ultrasound (high-frequency sound waves) to produce an image of the internal structures of the heart. A piezoelectric transducer placed on the surface of the chest converts electrical impulses into a narrow ultrasonic beam that penetrates body ...
echoencephalography: method for detecting abnormalities within the cranial cavity, based on the reflection of high-frequency sound pulses delivered to the head through a probe held firmly to the scalp. The reflected pulses from the skin, brain ventricle, skull, and other head ...
echolocation: a physiological process for locating distant or invisible objects (such as prey) by means of sound waves reflected back to the emitter (such as a bat) by the objects. Echolocation is used for orientation, obstacle avoidance, food procurement, and social ...
echos: melody type associated with early Byzantine liturgical chant. The eight echoi (hence, the collective oktoechos) of the Byzantine system were probably derived from Syrian music, and the concept of echos is also found in Armenian, Russian, and Coptic chant. Tradition ...
Echternach: town, eastern Luxembourg. It lies along the Sure River, at the German border, northeast of Luxembourg city. A vacation resort for Trier (Treves) in Roman times, it developed around a Benedictine abbey founded in 698 by St. Willibrord. The church ...
Echuca: city, northern Victoria, Australia. The name Echuca is derived from an Aboriginal term meaning "meeting of the waters," from the city's location at the junction of the Murray and Campaspe rivers. Founded in 1847 as a ferrying point, it developed ...
Ecija: city, Seville provincia, in the comunidad autonoma ("autonomous community") of Andalusia, southwestern Spain. It lies along the Genil River east of Seville. The city contains the Gothic-style Church of Santiago (15th century) and that of Santa Cruz on the site ...
Eck, Johann: German theologian who was Martin Luther's principal Roman Catholic opponent.
ECKANKAR: a Westernized version of the Punjabi Sant Mat or Radha Soami Satsang spiritual tradition. ECKANKAR was founded in 1965 by Paul Twitchell (c. 1908-71).
Eckener, Hugo: German aeronautical engineer and commander of the first lighter-than-air aircraft to fly around the world.
Eckermann, Johann Peter: German writer, chiefly remembered as the assistant and close associate of the aging author J.W. von Goethe; his Gesprache mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 1823-32, 3 vol. (1836-48; "Conversations with Goethe in the Last Years of His ...